This pervasive desire to block, protect, monitor, and control your children's online activities through nebulous supervision tools seems like a particularly American solution to a particularly American problem. Much like how little Timmy simply can't go out to play without a GPS anklet and an air tag behind each ear, so too can't he go online without a supervised account on a supervised device on a supervised connection.

Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.

Or put another way, if your child must eventually swim in the sea, would rather that they know how to swim, or strap a fifth flotation device onto their back?

Honest question: are you a parent?

My daughter, when she was 6 or 7, was terrified by certain things she accidentally found on YouTube, and asked me to have them filtered out. At 13, she already didn't need that, of course, but the notion of "kids" includes "small kids", who definitely should not be exposed to everything the Internet has to offer, or let to go out unsupervised.

Because I want a device for my kids to play games.

Not communicate.

Not buy stuff.

Just play (local) games.

Stuff like online communications will come at a later age. Absolutely no reason to start explaining that to a 5 year old.

And absolutely no reason to have all 3 bundled in one.

> Take an earnest interest in your child's activities, both online and offline. Guide them how to behave in strange, even weird and scary situations with strangers. Be the reliable adult in their life to whom they can tell when they encounter something unpleasant, online or offline. Under the guidance of a parent your children will be safer than behind any amount of protective layers that these so called child-safety apps provide, and they will also know how to help their friends to navigate risk and avoid danger.

Everything you just said is true for gun ownership as well!

You shouldn't constantly be hovering over your kids. Still, you don't want them to get in serious trouble. As a parent, you can curate the options they have without knowing exactly what they are doing. You can fill bookshelves with appropriate books, and if you see them reading on the couch, you don't need to know exactly what they're reading. Some people also are able to control where they live, what schools their kids go to, what friends you invite over to your house, etc.

One day your kid might have the friend over that you suspect might be trouble. You check in a little more often. Online is harder. You see them with the device, and without controls, what's going on could be almost anything.

Young kids exposed to overly attracting games cannot limit these activities by themselves. This has nothing to do with a lack of explanation, but rather with how the brains of young kids function. Thus, accessible parental controls with a simple mechanism that limits the access to games, blocks ads, disables marketplace access and sets a maximum gaming time per day are a much-needed tool that parents should have in their hands.

Some kids only need the honor system, but others, especially younger ones, need hard restrictions. If the parent is reasonable and the kid grows up smart, they’ll be thankful later, which is why kids also get restricted offline.

Rough analogies:

- Not letting kids buy unlimited candy ~ not giving them unlimited screen time

- Preventing your kid from interacting with “bad” kids or going into unsafe neighborhoods ~ blocking “bad” websites

- Not letting your kid watch adult shows or go to adult places ~ automatically hiding NSWF content

On the last point: if you’re not careful and your kid is unlucky, they may find shocking and traumatizing content accidentally. This is true in real life but the internet moreso (vs safe neighborhoods), even today. e.g. I regularly hear reports about Instagram recommending gore seemingly out of nowhere, such as https://www.cbsnews.com/news/instagram-violence/ (Instagram seems particularly notorious for some reason).

Do you reject bicycle helmets and other safety apparatus because you take an interest in your child’s activities? They’re gonna have to learn to ride without falling off eventually anyway

Because the situation is not symmetrical. The corporations and strangers have direct access to the child’s online presence and are constantly monitoring and hovering over them. If the corporations don’t want to lose that constant access then the parents react by being vigilant on their end. It _is_ the social contract set by the corporations.

Meanwhile in the EU: growing effort to simply outright ban social media for under-16s.

It's really not unique. America might be high on the list and a bit weird about it, but it is most definitely not alone.

While this is a sound theoritical advice, the real world has changed a lot. Parents and elder siblings are not the only people kids interact with. For every parent mindful of dangers of unsupervised internet access, there are many parents who give unrestricted access to tiktok (and rest of the internet) because everyone other person does that, and then kids share.

Businesses don't care for the careful minority when they know such advices will be shared, silencing those who really care.

Even the feature name "parental control" is chosen to induce guilt in parents.

> to a particularly American problem

The Internet and mobile phones are not a particularly American problem. They’re literally everywhere.

I made the mistake of giving my child access to Roblox when he was 7, assuming that they did some sort of moderation. Luckily, the worst thing he found was a game that told him he was going to die that night. It scared the hell out of him. After doing a bit more research on Roblox, I decided to ban it from the household. I'm happy that I did, considering it seems that it's just a cesspool of predators.

It's fine and well to say the solution is to just be around more or take an interest in what they're doing, but that is hard to do with full time jobs, multiple kids, etc. Parental controls are supposed to exist to let the parents let their kids explore in a safe space. It's not about constant supervision or tracking, its more akin to hiring a babysitter rather than leave your children home alone.

Europeans have trouble understanding in part because social trust is still high in many parts of Europe due to regional monoculturalism.

Particularly American? What does that mean? That parents in other countries are better than us? That they have more time, more know how, more wisdom? Sorry but that's stupid and insulting, which I suspect was your intent.

This is good advice.

However, it doesn't work for families where both parents have to work 2-3 jobs just to keep food on the table and the heat on all winter.

And no; poor families neither do nor should "just keep the kids from getting cellphones" or something (not that you would necessarily make that argument, but I've seen its like too many times on HN...).

Poor parents can certainly still "take an earnest interest", but they're much less likely to be able to be there...and, frankly, due to the stresses and pressures of Living While Poor, they're less likely to have the emotional bandwidth to communicate clearly and productively about these things, too.

Now, what is the answer? ...hell if I know. Being poor sucks, and there aren't always good ways around that.